Chapter V (1)

SOME METAPHYSICAL IMPLICATIONS OF ETHICS
AND RELIGION

§ 1. If Reality is a harmonious system, it must somehow make provision
for the gratification of our ethical, religious, and æsthetic
interests. § 2. But we cannot assume that ethical and religious
postulates are necessarily _true_ in the forms in which our
practical interests lead us to make them. § 3. Thus, while morality
would become impossible unless on the whole there is coincidence
between virtue and happiness, and unless social progress is a
genuine fact, “perfect virtue,” “perfect happiness,” “infinite
progress” are logically self-contradictory concepts. § 4. But this
does not impair the practical usefulness of our ethical ideals. § 5.
In religion we conceive of the ideal of perfection as already
existing in individual form. Hence ultimately no part of the
temporal order can be an adequate object of religious devotion. § 6.
This leads to the _Problem of Evil_. “God” cannot be a finite being
within the Absolute, because, if so, God must contain evil and
imperfection as part of His nature, and is thus _not_ the already
existing realisation of the ideal. § 7. This difficulty disappears
when we identify “God” with the Absolute, because in the Absolute
evil can be seen to be mere illusory appearance. It may, however, be
true that religious feeling, to be practically efficient, may need
to imagine its object in an ultimately incorrect anthropomorphic
form. § 8. The existence, within the Absolute, of finite “divine”
personalities, can neither be affirmed nor denied on grounds of
general Metaphysics. § 9. Proofs of the “being of God.” The
principle of the “ontological” and “cosmological” proofs can be
defended against the criticism of Hume and Kant only if we identify
God with the Absolute. The “physicotheological proof” could only
establish the reality of finite superhuman intelligences, and its
force depends purely upon empirical considerations of evidence.

§ 1. The metaphysician is perhaps at times too ready to treat experience as though it were constituted solely by intellectual interests; as though our one concern in dealing with its deliverances, as they come to us, were to construct out of them a system of knowledge satisfactory to our demand for coherent thinking. This is, of course, a one-sided, and therefore, from the standpoint of Metaphysics itself, an imperfect expression of the nature of our attitude as intelligences towards the world of our experience. Our moral, religious, and artistic, no less than our logical, ideals represent typical forms of our general interest as intelligent beings in bringing harmony and order into the apparently discordant material of experience. Hence no study of metaphysical principles, however elementary, would be complete without some discussion of the light thrown by these various ideals upon the ultimate structure of the system of Reality in which we and our manifold interests form a part. If it is the fundamental principle of a sound philosophy that all existence forms a harmonious unity, then, if we can discover what are the essential and permanent features in the demands made by art, morality, and religion upon the world, we may be sure that these demands are somehow met and made good in the scheme of things.

For a world which met our ethical, religious, and aesthetic demands upon life with a _mere_ negative would inevitably contain aspects of violent and irreconcilable discord, and would thus be no true world or systematic unity at all. In what follows I propose to discuss the double question, What appears to be the “irreducible minimum” of the demands which morality and religion make of the world, and how far the general conception of existence defended in our earlier chapters provides for their liquidation. The consideration of our aesthetic ideals and their metaphysical significance I propose to decline, on the ground both of its inferior practical interest for mankind at large, and of the very special and thorough training in the psychological analysis of æsthetic feeling which is, in my own judgment at least, essential for the satisfactory treatment of the question.

§ 2. In dealing with the subject thus marked out, it will be necessary to begin with a word, partly of caution, partly of recapitulation of previous results, as to the attitude towards the practical ideals of morality and religion imposed upon the metaphysician by the special character of his interests as a metaphysician. It will thus be apparent why I have spoken in the last paragraph of an “irreducible _minimum_” of ethical and religious postulation. There is a marked tendency among recent writers on philosophical topics, encouraged more specially by Professor James and his followers, to urge that any and every ideal which we think valuable for the purposes of morality and religion has no less claim to be accepted in Metaphysics as of value for our conception of Reality than the fundamental principles of logical thought themselves. Logical thinking, it is contended, is after all only one of the functions of our nature, by the side of others such as moral endeavour towards the harmonising of practice with an ideal of the right or the good, aesthetic creation of the beautiful, and religious co-operation with a “power not ourselves that makes for righteousness.” Why, then, should the metaphysician assume that the universe is more specially bound to satisfy the demands of the logical intellect than those of the “practical reason” of morality and religion or the “creative reason” of art? Must we not say that the demand of the logician that the world shall be intelligible stands precisely on the same footing as the moralist’s demand that it shall be righteous, or the artist’s that it shall be beautiful, and that all three are no more than “postulates” which we make, in the last resort, simply because it satisfies our deepest feelings to make them? Must we not, in fact, say alike to the followers of Logic, of Ethics, of Religion, and of Art, “Your claims on the world are ultimately all of the same kind; they are made with equal right, and so long as any one of you is content to advance his postulate as a postulate, and at his own personal risk, no one of you has any pretension to criticise or reject the postulates of the others”?

The doctrine I have attempted to summarise thus briefly, I believe to be partly irrelevant in Metaphysics, partly mistaken, and therefore, so far as mistaken, mischievous. I pass lightly over the curious mental reservation suggested by the claim to believe as you list “at your own risk.” As George Eliot has reminded us in _Adam Bede_, it is a fundamental fact of our position as members of a social order, that nothing in the world can be done exclusively at the risk of the doer. Your beliefs, so far as they receive expression at all, like all the rest of your conduct, inevitably affect the lives of others as well as your own, and hence it is useless to urge in extenuation of a false and mischievous belief to which expression has been given—and a belief which gets no kind of expression is no genuine belief at all—that it was entertained at your “personal risk.” That no man liveth to himself is just as true of the metaphysician as of any other man, and he has no more claim than another to disregard the truth in practice.

To pass to a more important point. It is no doubt true that the attainment of satisfaction for our intellectual need for a coherent way of thinking about existence is only one of a number of human interests. And thus we may readily grant that morality, religion, and art have a right to existence no less than Logic. Further, the question whether any one of the four has a _better_ right to existence than the others seems to be really unmeaning. There seems to be no sense in asking whether any typical and essential human aspiration has a superior claim to recognition and fulfilment rather than another. But it does not seem to follow that _for all purposes_ our divergent interests and attitudes are of equal value, and that therefore they may not legitimately be used as bases for mutual criticism. In particular, it does not seem to follow that because Logic and morality, say, have an equal right to exist, there must be an equal amount of _truth_ in the principles of Logic and the postulates of Ethics. Truth, after all, is perhaps not the “one thing needful” for human life, and it is not self-evident even that truth is the supreme interest of morality and religion.

On the face of things, indeed, it seems not to be so. _Primâ facie_, it looks as if the logician’s ideal of truth and the moralist’s ideal of goodness were, in part at any rate, divergent. For it is by no means clear that the widest possible diffusion of true thinking and the general attainment of the highest standard of moral goodness must necessarily go together. It may even be conducive to the moral goodness of a community that many members of it should not think on certain topics at all, or even should think erroneously about them.[211] And the ideals of goodness and beauty, we may remind ourselves, seem to be similarly divergent. It is by no means self-evident, and might even be said to be, so far as history enables us to judge, probably untrue, that the society in which the appreciation of beauty is most highly developed is also the society with the highest standard of goodness.

Now, if truth and goodness are not simply identical, we cannot conclude that the ultimate truth of a belief is proportionate to its moral usefulness in promoting practical goodness. And therefore the metaphysician, who takes ultimate truth as _his_ standard of worth, would appear to be quite within his right in refusing to admit moral usefulness as sufficient justification for a belief, just as the moralist, from the point of view of his special standard of worth, may rightly decline to take the aesthetic harmoniousness of a life as sufficient evidence of its moral excellence. Until you have shown, what the view I am here opposing appears tacitly to assume, that truth, moral goodness, and beauty are one thing, you cannot rationally refuse the metaphysician’s claim to criticise, and if necessary to condemn as not finally true, the “postulates” of which Ethics is entitled to assent, not that they are “true,” but that they are practically useful.

And, of course, the same liberty must be granted to Ethics itself. The moralist, I would not only admit but insist, has a perfect right to criticise, from his special standpoint, the doctrines of the metaphysician. It may perfectly well be that certain “truths” are better not generally known, in the interests of practical goodness, and the moralist is fully justified in dwelling upon the fact. But when the metaphysician asserts the truth of a proposition solely on the strength of its value for the promotion of morality, he is deserting the criterion of value which he is bound in his capacity of metaphysician to respect. It is quite true that logic is not the only game at which it interests mankind to play, and that no one need play this special game unless he prefers it; but when you have once sat down to the game you must play it according to its own rules, and not those of some other. If you neglect this caution, you will most likely produce something which is neither good Metaphysics nor sound Ethics. There is every reason for Metaphysics to beware of a “will to believe” which in practice must mean that licence to indulge in uncriticised assertion which Socrates in the _Phædo_ calls by the appropriate name of “misology,” and identifies as the psychological source of the worst forms of practical “disillusionment with life.”[212]

It follows, if these reflections are sound, that we must not, as metaphysicians, allow ourselves to assume the truth of any and every conviction about the nature of the world which we find personally inspiring and attractive, or even which we believe to have an invigorating effect upon the moral practice of mankind in general. We cannot, on _a priori_ grounds, dismiss the suggestion that it may make for practical goodness that all of us to some extent, and many of us to a very great extent, should be dwellers in the imperfectly illuminated regions on the “mid way boundary of light and dark.”[213] On the other hand, it would manifestly be incompatible with the presence of any rational unity of structure in the experience-world that there should be a final and absolute lack of harmony between that world, as it must be conceived by true thinking, and as it must be if our ethical aspirations are to be satisfied. Somehow and somewhere, if the world is a teleological unity at all, these aspirations must be provided for and made good by its real structure, though possibly not in the form in which, with our present limited insight, we desire that they should be met, and though, again, we may be unable ever to say precisely in _what_ form they are met. What is simply inconceivable in a rational world is that our abiding aspirations should meet with blank defeat.

§ 3. What, then, appears to be the “indispensable minimum” of accord between known truth and our “ethical postulates,” without which the moral life itself would become irrational? On the whole, I think we may say that morality cannot maintain itself except upon two suppositions—(1) that in the main and on the whole the world is so ordered that our moral struggle for fuller and stronger individuality of life is successful; that by living the moral life our individual character does become richer in coherent interest and more completely unified; and (2) that the gain thus won by our private struggles does not perish with our disappearance from this mortal scene, but is handed on to the successors who replace us in the life of the social order to which we belong. Speaking roughly, this means that unless morality is a delusion, the moral life is, on the whole, the happy life, and that there is such a thing as social progress. Now, both these conditions, I would contend, are shown by the actual experience of mankind to be met by the constitution of the real world. It was by the analysis of actual social life, and not by an appeal to postulates of a transcendental kind, that Plato and Aristotle showed that the good man is, in the main, even in the present state of society, the “happy” man. And it is by a similar analysis that the modern thinker must convince himself, if he convinces himself at all, that human societies are progressive.

So far, then, no question of ultimate metaphysical issues seems to be involved in the practical demand of the moral life. The case would, of course, be different if we were with Kant to regard it as a necessary demand of Ethics that the world shall be so constituted that, in the end, and for every individual agent, happiness shall be exactly proportioned to virtue. Still more so if we went on to assert that morality is a delusion unless every individual is predestined, by the nature of things, to the ultimate attainment of complete virtue and complete happiness. Views of this kind would manifestly have to be defended by an appeal to metaphysical principles which do not find their complete justification in the empirically known structure of human society. So too the demand that human society itself shall be progressive beyond all limits, cannot be shown to be justified by what is empirically known of the structure and the non-human environment of our society. And if Ethics really does postulate either the complete coincidence of virtue with happiness for the individual, or the infinite progress of society, it is clearly committed to the postulation of very far-reaching metaphysical doctrines.

Further, it must be frankly owned that these postulates, as they stand, are inconsistent with the scheme of metaphysical doctrine expounded and defended in the present work. For both moral goodness and moral progress are bound up with finite individuality and its characteristic form of existence, the time-process. Of “progress” this is manifest: all progress is advance in time, and is advance from a relatively worse to a relatively better. And with “virtue” it stands no otherwise. For to be virtuous is not simply to _have_ an individuality which is at once harmonious and rich in contents, but to _make_ such an individuality for ourselves out of the raw material of disposition and environment. Only in the progress towards fuller individuality are we moral agents, and, just because we are finite, the complete attainment of an absolutely harmonious individuality is for ever beyond us. Hence absolutely perfect virtue—and consequently absolutely perfect happiness—are incompatible with our nature as genuine but finite individuals. In all finite individuality there is inevitably some aspect of imperfection and consequently of sadness, though sin and sadness ought to fill, and can be empirically seen to fill, an increasingly subordinate place in proportion to the degree of individuality attained. The same reasoning is equally applicable to the case of any finite society.

Nor does this seem any ground for regarding the constitution of the universe as ethically unsatisfactory. To repeat the previously quoted remark of Mr. Bradley, no one has a right to call the universe morally unsatisfactory on the ground that it does not precisely apportion happiness to virtue, unless he is prepared to show that more goodness would be produced by making the correspondence exact, and to show this is impossible. Still more absurd would it be to censure the universe because neither _perfect_ virtue nor _perfect_ happiness is attainable. For morality itself has no existence except as the creation of finite individuals, and hence we cannot without absurdity censure the universe on _moral_ grounds for containing finite individuals, and so providing for the existence of morality.

§ 4. Would the case be altered if we had, or thought we had, grounds for holding that the progress of human society has fixed and knowable bounds set to it by the nature of things? If we could know, for instance, that the physical environment of humanity is so constituted that human life _must_ ultimately disappear from the earth? I cannot see that it would. No doubt the widespread acceptance of a belief that the end of things was at hand within a calculable period, might tend to lessen our moral earnestness, and if the period were taken to be sufficiently short, might lead to downright licence and wickedness. But so does a belief in the approaching dissolution of any historic and wide-reaching social order; and yet the fact that societies suffer dissolution is not commonly regarded as reasonable ground for an indictment against the universe. Nor is there any logical connection between such beliefs and their consequences. We cannot say that because human society is perishable, if it is perishable, its achievements must have been wasted and therefore its progress useless. The result of our achievements might, in some way unknown to us, survive our extinction as a race, even as we can partly see that the results of the individual life are preserved after our death.

And, in any case, it is beyond the power of Metaphysics to set any fixed limits to the existence and progress of human society. As we have seen, Metaphysics gives us no reason to deny, though it does not enable us to affirm, that the social life begun under present conditions may be continued under unknown conditions beyond the grave. And even the disappearance of physical human life within a calculable period cannot be shown to follow from any principle of Metaphysics. At most we can say that _if_ certain assumed physical laws, especially that of the dissipation of energy, are valid for all physical processes, and if again, the psychical factor in living organisms is incapable of reversing the “down-grade” tendency of energy to pass into forms unavailable for work, then the human society we know must come to an end within a calculable time. But whether the assumptions upon which this conclusion is based are or are not true, Metaphysics by itself cannot determine.

We are thus left in the following position. That on the whole the virtuous life is also the happy life, and that there is genuine social progress,[214] seem to be empirically known certainties. “Absolute perfection” of the finite as finite, and “infinite progress” seem alike excluded as metaphysical impossibilities. But no definite limits can be set by Metaphysics to the possibilities of individual and social advance towards greater virtue and greater happiness. As for the theories in Physics which appear to threaten humanity with extinction within a measurable time, their truth is, to say the least of it, not assured, and we have, in our metaphysical conception of Reality as an individual whole, the certainty that, whatever becomes of the human species, nothing of all our aspirations and achievements can be finally lost to the universe, though we may be quite unable to imagine the manner of their preservation. And for the purposes of the moral struggle from a worse to a better, this seems to be quite as much conformity to our aspirations as we need ask of the world. For the suggestion that our ideals are not worth living for unless _we_ enjoy the fruit of our labours in the form we in particular should like, seems nothing better than an appeal to the baser Egoism.

§ 5. When we consider the specially _religious_ attitude of mind, we shall find that its demands upon the world go further than those of mere Ethics, and are, in part, of a rather different character. It would be impossible in a work like this to discuss at length the nature of the religious attitude, but this much at least would probably be admitted as beyond doubt. The religious attitude towards the world of experience is distinguished from all others partly by the specific character of the emotions in which it finds its expression, partly by the intellectual beliefs to which those emotions give rise. Specifically religious emotion, as we can detect it both in our own experience, if we happen to possess the religious “temperament”,[215] and in the devotional literature of the world, appears to be essentially a mingled condition of exaltation and humility arising from an immediate sense of communion and co-operation with a power greater and better than ourselves in which our ideals of good find completer realisation than they ever obtain in the empirically known time-order. In the various religious creeds of the world we have a number of attempts to express the nature of such a power and of our relation to it in more or less logically satisfactory conceptual terms. But it is important to remember that, though a theological belief when sincerely held may react powerfully upon religious feeling, the beliefs are in the last resort based upon immediate feeling, and not immediate feeling upon beliefs. In this sense, at any rate, it is true that all genuine religious life implies the practical influencing of feeling and action by convictions which go beyond proved and known truth, and may therefore be said to be matters of faith.

What the convictions to which we thus surrender the practical guidance of life are, in any individual case, seems to be largely a question of individual constitution and social tradition. Not only are the convictions as to the nature of the higher power represented by the great typical historical religions very various, but what we may call the individual religion of different persons exhibits even greater variety. There is hardly any important object of human interest which may not acquire for some man the significance which belongs to the completed realisation of his highest ideals. It is no more than the truth to say that a mother, a mistress, a country, or a movement, social or political, may be, as we often phrase it, a man’s “religion.”

Amid all this variety two general principles may be detected which are of primary importance to the metaphysical critic of religious experience. (1) It is essential to the religious experience that its object should be accepted as the really existing embodiment of an ideal. This is the point in which the religious attitude of mind differs most strikingly from that of mere morality. In the ethical experience the ideal is apprehended as something which does not yet exist, but has to be brought into existence by human exertion. Hence for the purely ethical attitude of mind the world has to be thought of as essentially imperfect, essentially out of accord with what it ought to be in order to correspond to our demands on it. Thus there is not for morality, as we shall directly see there must be for religion, such a thing as the “Problem of Evil.” That the world, as it comes to us in the temporal order, contains imperfection and evil which must be done away with, is a practical presupposition without which morality itself would have no _raison d’être_.

But in religion the case is otherwise. It is only in so far as the object of our adoration, whatever it may be, is taken to be the really existing embodiment of our highest ideals, that it can produce, in our spiritual communion with it, that combined emotion of exaltation and abasement, that feeling of being at once ourselves already perfect so far as our will is one in its contact with our ideal, and absolutely condemned and “subject to wrath” so far as it is not, which distinguishes the religious from all other states of mind. But all real existence, as we saw in our Second Book, is essentially individual. Hence it is of the essence of religion that it looks upon the ideal as already existing _in individual form_. This is why devotion to an abstract principle, such as nationality, socialism, democracy, humanity, proves so much inferior as a permanent expression of religious life, to devotion to a person, however imperfect.[216]

(2) It follows that mere appearance in the time-order cannot be the ultimate object of religious devotion. For the time-order itself, as we have seen, is essentially unfinished and incomplete, and no part of it, therefore, can be perfectly individual. The completely individual, if it exists at all, must have an existence which is not temporal. Hence no part of the temporal order of events, as such, can be finally satisfactory as an object of religious adoration. So far as it is possible to succeed in worshipping anything which forms part of that order, such as a man or a cause, this can only be done by regarding the temporal facts as an imperfect appearance of a reality which, because completely and perfectly individual, is in its true nature timeless. And it further follows that, since all finite individuality is, as we have already seen, only imperfectly individual, and because imperfect is temporal, the only finally adequate object of religious devotion must be the infinite individual or timeless Absolute itself.

That the great philosophical religions of the world have felt the force of this, is shown in history by the way in which they have inevitably tended to credit their various “gods” with omnipotence. Thus the god of the Hebrew religion, as at first presented to us in its earlier records, is represented as limited in power by the existence of other divine beings, and temporally changeable and mutable. But in the later Old Testament writings, the New Testament, and the subsequent constructions of ecclesiastical theology, we see the gradual development from these Hebrew beginnings of an idea of a God who is “all in all,” and limited neither by the existence of other divine beings with opposing aims and interests, nor by the inherent resistance of “matter,” to His purposes. So the Zoroastrian religion, in which the limitation of the power of the good being Ahura Mazda by the existence of a co-ordinate bad being, Angro Mainyus, was originally a fundamental tenet, is said to have become among the modern Parsis a pure monotheism.

§ 6. Now, it should be noted that this inevitable tendency of Religion itself to identify its object with ultimate Reality, conceived in its timeless perfection as a complete and infinite individual whole, leads to the difficult metaphysical “problem of evil.” For if God is the same thing as the Absolute, it would appear that evil itself must be, like everything else, a manifestation of His nature. And if so, can we say that God is strictly speaking “good,” or is the complete realisation of our ideals? It is this difficulty about evil, more than anything else, which has led many philosophers in both ancient and modern times to distinguish between the Absolute and God, and to regard God as simply one, though the highest and most perfect, among the finite individuals contained in the Absolute.[217] In the following paragraphs I propose not so much to offer a solution of this time-honoured puzzle, as to make some suggestions which may help to put the issue at stake clearly before the reader’s mind.

The doctrine of the finitude of God does not appear in any way to remove the difficulty about evil; in fact, it renders it, if anything, more acute. For evil must now appear in the universe in a double form. On the one hand, it admittedly is taken to exist outside God, as a hostile factor limiting His power of shaping the world to His purpose. But again, as we have seen, every finite individual, because finite, falls short of complete internal harmony of structure, and thus contains an element of defect and evil within itself. Thus evil will be inherent in the nature of a finite God, as well as in that of the existence supposed to be outside Him. We have, in fact, one more illustration of the principle that all limitation involves self-limitation from within. It is only by forgetting this fundamental truth that we can conceive the possibility of a being who is “perfectly good” and yet is less than the Absolute.

And even when we overlook this, our difficulties are not removed. For a “finite” God with a further reality outside and in some way opposed to His own nature, even when illogically thought of as perfectly good, must be at best only such another being as ourselves, though on a larger scale. He, like us, must be simply a partly successful, partly unsuccessful, actor in a universe of which the constitution and ultimate upshot are either unknown or known not to satisfy our religious demand for the complete individual reality of our ideal.[218] This is the view which has in history been actually adopted by religions like those of the Hellenes and the Norsemen, in which the gods are regarded as ultimately subject to an inscrutable and unethical Fate. But a finite being struggling, however successfully, against such an alien Fate is, after all, a fit object only for moral respect and sympathy, not for religious adoration. Such a being, however exalted, is still not that complete and harmonious individual realisation of all human aspiration for which Religion yearns, and is therefore not, in the full and true sense, God.

If, then, a finite ethical individual, however exalted, cannot be an adequate object of religious devotion, how does the case stand with the infinite individual whole of Reality? Can we worship the Absolute?[219] This is a question which needs some careful examination before we can venture on a positive answer.

§ 7. The problem, let it be observed, is not strictly psychological. Experience shows that individual men can derive religious support from belief in the most varied and most defective conceptions of the nature of the Deity. Beliefs which bring one man “peace in believing” might, if seriously entertained, blight another man’s life; one man’s God may be another’s devil. This is, however, not the point. The real question is, whether the Absolute can be made into an object of religious worship, as we have seen that finite individuals cannot, without a breach of logic. Has it the character which, as we have seen, anything which is to correspond to our ideal of “God” must logically possess?

At first sight it certainly would seem that it has. For, as we have seen, the Absolute contains all finite existence, and contains it as a perfectly harmonious system. And therefore all finite aspiration must somehow be realised in the structure of the Absolute whole, though not necessarily in the way in which we, as beings of limited knowledge and goodness, actually wish it to be realised. The Absolute whole is thus, as nothing else can be, the concrete individual reality in which our ideals have actual existence. As all our ideals themselves are but so many expressions of our place in the system and our relation to the rest of it, so the system itself is their concrete harmonious embodiment.

It is true, as we have already seen, that our ideals may not be realised in the whole just in the form in which we conceive them, but it must be remembered that in so far as we set up our private judgment and wishes as standards to which the whole is bound to conform on pain of condemnation, we are adopting an attitude which is at once illogical and irreligious. It is illogical, because it implies the assumption that with fuller knowledge of the system of Reality as a whole we should still desire the fulfilment of our aspirations in the special way which at present recommends itself to our imperfect insight. It is irreligious, because the demand that human desires shall be fulfilled in our way and not in “God’s way” involves the setting up of human wisdom against God’s, and is thus irreconcilable with genuine union of heart and will with the divine order.[220]

What then becomes, from this point of view, of the problem of evil? How can the presence of moral evil in the temporal order be reconciled with the thought of the Absolute whole as the complete and harmonious realisation of human ideals? I need not say that the _detailed_ solution of the problem is out of the question. As beings whose insight is necessarily limited by our own finitude, we cannot hope to see how in detail everything that appears to us as evil might, with larger knowledge, be known as an integral constituent of a whole which, as a whole, is the realisation of human aspiration, and therefore free from evil. But it is at least possible to make suggestions which may show that the problem is a mere consequence of the inevitable defects of our insight, and that it would disappear with fuller knowledge. It is not hard to see that there are two main reasons why the structure of the universe seems to finite insight partly evil. Our insight into the nature and connection of our purposes themselves is never complete; we are all, in part, ignorant of exactly what it is to which we aspire. Hence our purposes in part appear to be met by existence with a negative just because we are only imperfectly aware of what they mean and whither they tend. There is no more familiar fact than this, that even within the limits of our human life growing experience is constantly teaching us how confused and defective our judgment at any moment as to what we really want, can be. Largely, then, our ideals seem to be at variance with actual existence, because we never fully know what they are.

Again, our knowledge of the effects of our acts is always imperfect in the extreme. We seem to fail because we cannot see far enough to understand fully what it is we have effected. And both these causes of the apparent discrepancy between the real and the ideal may be traced to a single root. Existence appears to be in part evil, because we cannot take it in at once and as a whole in its individual structure. We have to make acquaintance with it by piecemeal, and as a succession of fragmentary events in the time-series. And imperfection, we have seen, belongs to the time-series. Hence we can see that evil is at once a mere appearance, and an appearance which is inevitable to the finite experience conditioned by the temporal form. The so-called “problem” is thus in principle insoluble only so long as we falsely think of the time-order itself as a characteristic of the Absolute whole in its real individuality.[221]

May we say, then, that the Absolute or whole is known in Metaphysics to be “good”? The answer depends upon the precise meaning we attach to the statement. In the sense that it is the really existing embodiment of the ideals we are trying amid our ignorance and confusion to realise, we clearly must say “yes.” But if we use the word “good” in a narrower sense, to mean “_ethically_ good,” we can hardly say without qualification that the whole is good. For “ethical goodness” belongs essentially to the time-order, and means the process of the gradual assertion of the ideal against apparent evil. To be morally good is to have an ideal that is not realised in the events of the time-order as they come to us in our finite experience, and to mould those events into conformity with the ideal. The moral life is from first to last a struggle, and where the struggle is absent it is misleading to speak of morality. Hence it is better not to call the Absolute “moral.”

But we must remember that the Absolute is only not moral, because it is something very much more than moral, only not ethical because there is in it no divorce of ideal from actuality, as there is in the imperfect experience of its finite members. Or, as we might say, it is something more than “good” precisely because it is already good. In morality, let it be remembered, we have, as in all the experience of finite beings, a process which is throughout directed upon a result that, once attained, would transcend the process itself. Morality would not be content with anything less than the total abolition of the evil in the world; and with the disappearance of evil, the struggle against it would itself disappear in some higher form of experience. Similarly, knowledge is constantly striving to exhaust the object of knowledge. So long as the object is in any respect unknown, the task of knowing is incomplete; yet if once we could so know any object that nothing further remained to be known about it, there would be no aspect of not-self in the object which could distinguish it from the subject by which it is known, and knowledge itself would thus be done away. Thus we may see from the side alike of cognition and of will how the whole life of the finite being forms a constant endeavour to widen experience into the complete apprehension of a content which, because infinite, could not be apprehended without the disappearance of finitude itself. Thus does experience witness to the truth of our fundamental doctrine, that the finite individual repeats in itself, in an imperfect and inadequate form, the structure of the infinite individual of which it is an appearance.

I do not know whether it is necessary to say more than a word with reference to the thoughtless objection so often urged against all philosophical and religious doctrines which deny the ultimate reality of evil, or, what is the same thing, the existence of an independent devil. If existence is already perfect, it is said, why should we seek to make it better at great trouble and inconvenience to ourselves by moral and political endeavour? Ought we not rather to sit with folded hands acquiescing lazily in “things as they are”? The doubt might even be carried further than this. For to “take things as they are” is just as much a course of self-chosen action as any other line of conduct, and it might hence be argued that abstention and moral effort are alike out of place and absurd in a world where everything is “perfect.”

The objection, of course, turns upon a mere confusion of existence as it is in its individual reality, and existence as it appears to us in the time-series. The argument for Quietism is based purely upon attributing to the essentially imperfect and incomplete series of temporal events the perfection which only belongs to the timeless whole. In that perfect whole our moral ideals and moral effort, as finite beings belonging to the temporal order, are of course included along with everything else, and its perfection is therefore no ground for treating them as nugatory. Our own moral struggle with the apparent evil of the time-series is itself an integral part of the Reality which, in its complete individual character, is already perfect, if we could but win to a point of view from which to behold it as it is. As Plotinus expresses it, “our striving is after good and our turning away is from evil, and thought with a purpose is of good and evil, and this is a good.”[222]

If we may not say without qualification that the Absolute is good, and certainly must not say that it is in the proper sense “ethical,” still less may we say that the Absolute is “morally indifferent.” For the Absolute is only not ethical because it is already all that ethical life consists in striving to become. Hence the higher a finite being stands in the ethical scale, as judged by the double criterion of the wealth of its interests in the world and the degree of harmony between them, the more adequately does its structure repeat that of the whole, and the higher is its degree of reality. And this means that the good man’s ideals are realised in the world-order with less of modification and reconstruction than the bad man’s. In a sense, as Professor Royce maintains, even the bad man’s confused and warring ideals get their fulfilment, since he too is aiming, however blindly, at a complete individuality as the goal of all his striving. But he is seeking it where it is not to be found, in the gratification of desires which cannot be allowed the supreme place in the direction of life without leading to the distraction and mutilation of the self. As Plato puts it, the bad man “does as he pleases,” and for that very reason never “does what he wills.” Hence the place of the good man in the economy of the universe is very different from that of the bad, and the world-order itself is the very reverse of “indifferent” to the distinction between them.[223]

My own conclusion, then, which I offer to the reader simply as my own, is that anything less than the Absolute is an inadequate object of religious devotion, and that the Absolute itself has the structure which such an object requires. If it should be further suggested that at any rate, when we come to actual experience, we find that we cannot represent the object of our worship to ourselves in an individual form of sufficient concreteness to stir effectual emotion and prompt to genuine action without clothing it in imagination with anthropomorphic qualities which metaphysical criticism proves inapplicable to the infinite individual, I should be inclined to reply that I admit the fact. And I do not think we need shrink from the conclusion that practical religion involves a certain element of intellectual contradiction. Thus, though God is not truly God until we deny the existence of any independent “evil” by which His nature is limited, it seems probable that the thought of ourselves as “fellow-workers with God” would hardly lead to practical good works unless we also inconsistently allowed ourselves to imagine God as struggling against a hostile power and standing in need of our assistance. But this only shows that the practical value of religion in guiding action is not necessarily dependent upon its scientific truth.

§ 8. Of course, it would be quite open to us to hold that there may be, within the Absolute, finite beings of superhuman power and goodness with whom humanity is capable of co-operating for ethical ends. Only such beings, if they exist, would not be God in the same sense in which the Absolute may be called God. They might deserve and win our reverence and our co-operation, but because themselves finite and therefore only imperfectly real and individual, they could not logically take the place which belongs only to the completely and perfectly individual realisation of the ideal. That would still fall partly outside them in the nature, as a whole, of the system which harmoniously includes both ourselves and them. Thus such beings would be “gods” in the sense of polytheism rather than God in that of monotheism.

Further, I can see no means of deciding _a priori_ that there could be only one such being in the universe. Even supposing the series of finite beings to be itself finite, it is not evident that it could contain only one “best” member. And supposing it infinite, could there be a “best” member at all?[224] Also it appears quite beyond the power of Metaphysics to find either proof or disproof of the existence and agency of such finite but exalted beings. We cannot say that our general conception of Reality is such as to negative the suggestion, and yet again that general conception gives us no positive evidence in favour of taking it as true. It would certainly be the grossest presumption to maintain that the Absolute can contain no higher types of finite individuality than those presented by human society; on the other hand, it would be equally presumptuous to assert that we have reasoned knowledge of their existence and their direct social relation with ourselves. Hence we must, I think, be content to say that the hypothesis, so far as it seems to be suggested to any one of us by the concrete facts of his own individual experience, is a matter for the legitimate exercise of Faith.

§ 9. These reflections may naturally lead to some remarks, which shall be made as brief as possible, about the so-called philosophical “arguments for the existence of God,” which played a prominent part in Metaphysics before their discrediting at the hands of Kant and Hume.[225] Kant’s great achievement lies in having demonstrated that the whole force of the “proofs” depends upon the famous ontological argument, best known in modern Philosophy in the form adopted by Descartes in the fifth _Meditation_. Descartes there argues thus:—By “God” I mean a completely perfect being. Now, existence is a perfection, and non-existence an imperfection. Hence I cannot think of a non-existing perfect being without self-contradiction. Hence God, because by hypothesis perfect, must exist, and is the _only_ being whose existence logically follows from its definition.

Kant’s even more famous criticism of this famous inference turns upon the principle which he had learned from his study of Hume, that logical necessity is “subjective.” If I think of a logical subject as defined by certain properties, he argues in effect, I am _necessitated_ to ascribe to it all the predicates implied in that definition. That is, I must affirm them or contradict myself. Hence, if “existence” is originally included among the perfections by which the subject “God” is defined, the proposition _God exists_ is certainly necessary, but is also tautological, and amounts, in fact, to the mere assertion that “an existing perfect being is an existing perfect being.” But if the “existence” spoken of in the predicate is something not included in the definition of the subject, then you cannot infer it from that definition. Now “real existence” is not a predicate which can be included in the definition of a concept. The predicates by which an imaginary hundred dollars are defined are the same as those of a real hundred dollars. It is not by the possession of a new predicate, but by being actually given in a concrete experience, that the real coins differ from the imaginary. Hence all propositions asserting real existence are _synthetic_, (_i.e._ assert of their subject something which is not contained in the concept of it), and the real existence of God or any other object can never be deduced from its definition.[226]

This Kantian criticism has itself been subjected to much criticism, principally at the hands of Hegel and those subsequent philosophers who have been specially affected by the Hegelian influence. What appears to be the general principle of the Hegelian criticism has been most clearly expressed in English philosophy by Mr. Bradley,[227] upon whose discussion the following remarks are chiefly founded.

In estimating the worth of the ontological proof, we must distinguish between the general principle implied in it and the particular form in which it presents that principle. It is manifest that Kant is perfectly right when he contends that, taking existence to mean presence in the space and time-order, you cannot reason from my possession of any idea to the existence of a corresponding object. You cannot say whatever I conceive must exist as I conceive it. But the principle of the ontological proof is perhaps not necessarily condemned by its failure to be thus universally applicable. The principle involved appears to be simply this. The idea and the reality outside its own existence as a fact in the time-order which it “means” or “stands for” are mutually complementary aspects of a whole Reality which include them both. For there is, on the one side, no “idea” so poor and untrue as not to have some meaning or objective reference beyond its own present existence.[228] And, on the other, what has no significance for any subject of experience is nothing. Hence in its most general form the ontological argument is simply a statement that reality and meaning for a subject mutually imply one another. But it does not follow that all thoughts are equally true and significant. In other words, though every thought _means_ something beyond its own existence, different thoughts may represent the structure of that which they mean with very different grades of adequacy. That which my thought means may be far from being real in the form in which I think it.

Now, we may surely say that the more internally harmonious and systematic my thought is, the more adequately it represents the true nature of that which it means. If thoroughly systematic coherent thought may be mere misrepresentation, our whole criterion of scientific truth is worthless. How freely we use this ontological argument in practice will be readily seen by considering the way in which, _e.g._, in the interpretation and reconstruction of historical facts, the internal coherency of a systematic and comprehensive interpretation is taken as itself the evidence of its truth.[229] Hence it may be argued that if there is a systematic way of thinking about Reality which is absolutely and entirely internally coherent, and from its own nature must remain so, however the detailed content of our ideas should grow in complexity, we may confidently say that such a scheme of thought faithfully represents the Reality for which it stands, so far as any thought can represent Reality. That is, while the thought would not _be_ the Reality because it still remains thought, which _means_ something beyond its own existence, it would require no modification of structure but only supplementation in detail to make it the truth.

But if we have anywhere thought which is thus internally coherent, and from its own nature must remain so, however knowledge may extend, we have it surely in our metaphysical conception of the real as the absolutely individual. Thus the ontological proof appears, in any sense in which it is not fallacious, to amount merely to the principle that significant thought gives us genuine knowledge; and therefore, since the thoroughgoing individuality of structure of its object is presupposed in all significant thought, Reality must be a perfect individual. That this perfect individual must further be “God,” _i.e._ must have the special character ascribed to it by beliefs based upon specifically religious emotions, does not follow. How far the “God” of religion is a correct conception of the metaphysical Absolute, we can only learn from the analysis of typical expressions of the religious experience itself. And it is obvious that if by “God” we mean anything less than the Absolute whole, the ontological proof ceases to have any cogency. It is impossible to show that the possibility of significant thought implies the presence of a special finite being, not empirically known to us, within the Absolute.